Clarissa Peterson (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Lilly Ledbetter speaks at a rally for pay equity in Washington, D.C., July 2008.
Lilly Ledbetter Fought the Bastards—and Won for All of Us
Forget the cartoonish “Great Man” version of American history; nearly all social progress in our country has been spurred by unheralded “nobodies” who felt a sting of injustice—and resolved to right the wrong.
Lilly Ledbetter, who recently died at age 86, was one such trailblazing rebel, and it’s worth remembering her gutsy stand for “paycheck fairness.” After almost twenty years as a supervisor at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama, Ledbetter was stunned in 1998 to learn that she had routinely been paid about 40 percent less than men doing the same job, robbing her of some $200,000. She promptly sued Goodyear for sex discrimination . . . and won. Justice!
But Goodyear unleashed a pack of lawyers to drag Ledbetter through spirit-sucking years of legal appeals, including to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, far-right judicial extremist Samuel Alito absurdly decreed that she should have filed her claim of sex discrimination when it first started two decades ago. Never mind that she had no way of knowing back then that she was being gouged, Alito is not one to let reality interfere with his political agenda. So she lost.
But sometimes you win by losing. Stung by the injustice, Ledbetter became a modern-day Mother Jones, launching a fiery national campaign for workplace fairness. Backed by women’s groups and labor, her tenacious organizing finally compelled Washington to enact the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, eliminating the sex-discrimination loophole exploited by the likes of Alito and Goodyear.
Ledbetter never got a penny of the money the system cheated her out of, but with the passage of this law, she rightly said: “I have an even richer reward.”
Yes. And so does America.
Isn’t It Odd That Public Officials Support Corporate Price Gouging?
Corporate lobbyists and politicians recently jumped all over Vice President Kamala Harris for her proposal to outlaw price gouging by food giants and grocery store chains.
The partisans piled on Harris, sputtering like old Joe McCarthy that she was pushing “Soviet-style” government price setting. Of course, these latter-day McCarthyites were either lying, ignorant, or both. Far from promoting price setting, Harris was blasting price gouging. Big difference.
The ugly truth is that most public officials have quietly been pro-gouging for decades. By refusing to enforce antitrust laws, they’ve helped conglomerated food giants steadily amass monopoly power over the production, processing, and marketing of food in nearly every American community. Big brand names then use that brute force to crush independent competitors, cheat customers, and consolidate even more power for themselves.
That is illegal. We have national laws, like the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, that prohibit corporations from rigging the rules to control markets and rip off consumers. But, since unlimited corporate campaign donations have flooded into our elections, monopolists have essentially bought off officials in both parties who now ignore antitrust law, rebranding such market thuggery as “free enterprise” efficiency.
Thus, local and state governments routinely hand out millions of our tax dollars to subsidize big-name supermarket chains, meatpacking factories, dollar stores, and other giants—all in the name of “consumers” and “competition.” No one mentions that these public giveaways provide the monopolistic market clout that allows the national outfits to clobber independent businesses, shrivel local competition, and—voilà—gouge consumers.
Harris was right to call out grocery price gouging and to push for stronger actions to stop it, but action number one is to enforce the anti-monopoly laws already on the books.